Relative Strangers (19 page)

“Let me tell you about the Meads and the Sinclairs,” Kelvin was muttering. “The Meads may have done some terrible things, but the Sinclairs are every bit as wicked.”

“I’d like to hear what you have to say,” Corrie said. Her voice shook a little, but she sounded sincere. “However, I think you’ve misunderstood my reason for being here.”

“I was just a boy,” Kelvin whined, paying no attention to Corrie’s words at all. “My mother was a widow. Hugh Sinclair thought that meant she was fair game.”

Suddenly Lucas wanted to hear whatever Kelvin had to say too.

“He never intended to marry her. He didn’t want to be saddled with raising another man’s son.”

Stanley Kelvin’s father, Lucas recalled, had been killed during World War II. Hugh hadn’t been old enough to enlist. That meant he’d been barely twenty during the time Kelvin was babbling about. Maybe a young man sowing wild oats but hardly a seasoned seducer. If he’d been intimate with Kelvin’s mother, an older woman, it had to have been at Rita Kelvin’s invitation.

That wasn’t an image Lucas cared for. He remembered “old lady” Kelvin as the woman who called the cops every time a bunch of kids took a shortcut across her backyard.

“He ruined her life,” Kelvin complained. He was pacing, ignoring Corrie completely. “He ruined mine too. She loved him and he abandoned her. Left town. Came back married to another woman.”

A quick calculation reassured Lucas. What Kelvin tried to make seem like a matter of months had actually been some fifteen years.

Hugh had been thirty-five when he’d met and married Lucas’s mother.

“I’m sorry for that,” Corrie said, “but it wasn’t the Marguerite who was your mother that I wanted to talk about. It was the earlier one. Horatio Mead’s runaway daughter.”

“Oh, I know about her too.” Bitterness made Kelvin’s voice harsh, but there was a slight relaxation in the set of his shoulders. Lucas wondered what had prompted his sudden prickly defense of his mother, then decided he didn’t want to go down that road, not even in his imagination.

“What do you mean?” Corrie asked Kelvin.

“She abandoned her family. Betrayed the Meads. Just as the sainted Adrienne did. Marguerite was supposed to marry old Nehemiah Jones, so he’d invest in the hotel. She ran off with the local bootmaker instead.”

“Mr. Skinner,” Corrie murmured. She’d begun to edge toward the door.

“Hold it right there,” Kelvin ordered. “I don’t trust you.”

“The feeling is mutual, Mr. Kelvin. Why are we here in this . . . closet? Wouldn’t it be pleasanter to discuss our business in the lobby? Let me buy you a drink.”

His laugh was nasty. “I wouldn’t touch the rotgut they serve at my bar.”

“Then I think I’d better be leaving.” Corrie’s voice shook, enough to prompt Lucas to take action.

Before Kelvin could even think about making any threatening moves, Lucas had pushed past him to shield Corrie with his own body. The expression of relieved surprise on her face set his heart racing. He’d been concerned she’d resent his interference.

“Time to leave now?” he suggested.

She seemed to get her nerve back once she knew she was not alone, and said, “Perhaps a moment more?”

Kelvin might be wary of Lucas’s greater physical strength, but he plastered on his familiar smirk. “If you’re going to tell me you want to go looking for Marguerite’s heirs,” he told Corrie, “I can assure you that you’ll be wasting your time. I lost this place to bankruptcy. Then I bought it back with my own hard-earned money. It’s really mine now. Nothing can take it from me.”

Bought with money embezzled from the Sinclairs? Lucas wondered. In spite of that suspicion, he couldn’t help feeling sorry for Stanley Kelvin. This pathetic man had plainly grown up under the thumb of a twisted and vindictive mother who’d taught him to hate because her own desires had been thwarted.

“I am Marguerite’s heir,” Corrie said, “but I don’t want your hotel. I only want what Adrienne Sinclair must have wanted, for both families to know and accept the truth.”

“We’ve always known.” Kelvin looked insufferably smug. “Old Jonathan hated his sister. Horatio sent him to find her. Jonathan came back and told the old man she was dead. End of story.”

“Not quite.”

Lucas was concerned about how much more Corrie meant to tell Kelvin, but he didn’t try to stop her.

“The rest of my family needs to be told,” she said. “And the Sinclairs.”

Kelvin shrugged. “So tell them.”

Lucas waited.

After a moment, Corrie nodded. “End of story,” she said. “And it had better be the end of the feud as well.” She looked Stanley Kelvin right in the eye. “One more hint of trouble at the Sinclair House and I go straight to Officer Tandy and report that you assaulted me.”

Kelvin sputtered in protest, but she cut him off.

“With your record, who do you think a jury will believe? Smarten up, Mr. Kelvin. You stay in your hotel and we’ll stay in ours.”

Grinning broadly, Lucas offered Corrie his arm. When she took it, they swept out of the closet and through the office in a grand manner that would have made Adrienne proud. Neither of them spoke until they were safely inside Corrie’s car and heading back across town. Lucas left the hotel van behind to be picked up later.

“You were right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone alone.”

“I should have offered to go with you.”

He could feel her intense gaze on his profile as he drove. “You do realize I’m
related
to that man? That he’s
family?”
she asked.

“I don’t recommend that you embrace Kelvin as a cousin. Look what happened to Pop when he tried.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She paused. “Do you suppose I convinced him to end the feud?”

“You convinced me. I especially liked the way you referred to the Sinclair House as
our
hotel.”

He glanced her way and wondered why the inside of the car hadn’t caught on fire. The look in her eyes raised his internal temperature to a boil and turned his voice raspy. They might have been talking about Kelvin, but she sure as hell wasn’t thinking about any man but Lucas.

“I intend to embrace
my
newfound cousin,” he vowed. “Often.”

“You mean me?” she whispered.

“I mean you.” With an effort, he forced himself to pay attention to his driving. Keeping his eyes on the road ahead cleared his mind enough to warn him to be sensible. He mustn’t rush Corrie. They had all the time in the world now.

“Ready to share this story with my folks and your father?” he asked.

“Do we have a last chapter yet?”

He thought about that for a moment. “Not yet,” he conceded, “but I’m convinced you and I are headed for a happy ending.” He dared another quick glance. Again she was watching him intently. “I know we need to take it slow. Get to know each other better without matchmakers or ghosts involved. But I can’t help believing we have . . . something ahead of us.”

Her voice sounded as breathless as he felt. “Yes,” she said. “Definitely . . . something.”

* * * *

A short time later, at Lucas’s parents’ house, Corrie told the story of what she’d discovered one more time, revealing the reason Adrienne had come back to haunt the Sinclair House and her own connection to the family.

She felt a growing sense of belonging there. And an inexplicable but very strong certainty that Lucas had stopped doubting her. Impossible or not, he accepted that she’d been in contact with Adrienne’s spirit.

A sudden movement from Hugh startled them all. Slowly, laboriously, he rolled his wheelchair to the desk and began to type a message into the laptop. Lucas went to stand behind him, reading over his shoulder.

‘‘According to Pop,’’ he said after a few minutes, “the Todds came here to visit because Corrie’s grandmother, Alice Todd’s mother, had always talked about the place. They didn’t know of her connection to the family. Or if they did, they never mentioned it to Pop or his father. They arrived late in the day and were disappointed to find the hotel closed for the season.”

“But somehow they got in.” Corrie had been watching Hugh and was relieved to observe that he did not seem upset. He wanted to tell his story.

Lucas nodded. “My grandfather, Pop’s father, was a generous man. He felt sorry for Mrs. Todd, so, on an impulse, he invited them to stay anyway. Pop was annoyed about that. First, because they were already worried about the wildfires. They didn’t need guests to look out for. Then because the daughter claimed she’d seen a ghost.”

“She wanted to stay longer,” Corrie guessed.

“Yes. Pitched a fit when she was told they had to leave. That was the quarrel you saw, Corrie. And it took place when Pop insisted they evacuate because of the fire danger.”

“And the claim that she’d seen a ghost? He did nothing about that?”

“He had other things to worry about at the time.”

“The hotel lost one wing to the flames,” Joyce reminded her.

Lucas nodded. “That was the very next day. Pop says he did wonder, but the Todds let the matter drop. They never came back. He figured the girl just had an overactive imagination. He never gave the incident another thought until you came along, Corrie. Your experiences stirred up the old memory, and a sense of guilt because he hadn’t pursued it.”

“And that’s all Adrienne wanted to convey?” Donald Ballantyne asked. “That Marguerite was the real heir because Jonathan Mead was the love child of Cordelia La Fleur and some unknown man?”

“Oh, not unknown,” Joyce said. “It’s quite obvious who he was.”

Everyone turned to look at her, even Hugh.

“Well, to be more accurate, I can make an educated guess from studying old family photographs.” She trotted over to the bookshelves and withdrew one of her albums. When she found the page she wanted, she held the book out to Corrie. “There. See? That’s Douglas Sinclair, the older brother of the first Lucas. He left the area sometime around 1875 to go out West with his wife and family. Never came back.”

Douglas had not been on the family tree Joyce had given her.

“You’re saying Douglas was Jonathan’s father?” Lucas asked. “That Jonathan was a
Sinclair?”
He sounded appalled, and Corrie could guess why. This put Kelvin back in the family again.

Joyce flipped through the album until she found another photograph and extracted it to show around side by side with the portrait of Douglas. “Here’s Jonathan’s picture. You see? You can hardly miss the resemblance.”

They were as alike as Hugh and Lucas.

“Do you think Horatio knew?” Corrie asked.

“Who can tell? Once he married Cordelia, though, he accepted her son as his own. Then, of course, they had Marguerite. It’s possible Jonathan suspected who his real father was. He certainly had some problem with self-esteem. Everything I’ve read about him in old records indicates he wasn’t a very pleasant man. Petty. Quarrelsome. It didn’t surprise me to hear he lied to old Horatio, telling him Marguerite was dead so he’d have exclusive claim to the Phoenix Inn.”

“This is way too complicated for me,” Corrie’s father said. “Why go to all that bother?”

“Horatio might well have disowned Jonathan if Adrienne had told him Marguerite was still alive,” Corrie explained. “Even if she didn’t force him to acknowledge the truth of Jonathan’s paternity, there would still be the fact that Jonathan had lied about Marguerite being dead.” Horatio had loved his daughter. Corrie had seen that for herself the day he burst into the dining room at the Sinclair House.

Joyce was nodding. “That Adrienne didn’t speak up before she died must have been what kept her from resting in peace. It may not seem like much to us today, but back then it would have been a very big deal.”

“Do you suppose we’ll ever know if this is the right solution?” Lucas wondered.

“Oh, I think so.” Corrie sent Lucas a smile meant just for him. “If it isn’t, we’ll be seeing Adrienne again.”

The only one around with a stronger sense of family, she mused, was Adrienne Sinclair’s great-great-grandson.

* * * *

Four months later, Corrie’s wedding day dawned clear and bright, a perfect May morning. It was the warmest spring on record, too, to everyone’s great relief. She spent a few minutes going over the final plans for the following week’s Cozies Unlimited conference at the hotel, part of her job now that she was in charge of PR for the Sinclair House, then went to the armoire to take out her wedding gown.

Rachel came breezing in, holding up a delicate lace garter. “I’ve got your something borrowed.”

“Are you sure that isn’t the something old?”

Her something blue was a bouquet that contained the first forget-me-nots of spring, chosen to match her eyes, Lucas said.

“Could be both. It came out of a trunk in Joyce’s attic. I’m betting it belonged to the first Mrs. Lucas Sinclair.”

Adrienne.

No one had seen the ghost or experienced any sense of her presence since Corrie’s last dream. She hoped that meant she had succeeded in righting all the old wrongs, as much as they could be righted after the passage of so much time. Still, Corrie could not help wishing for some sign that Adrienne approved of what she’d done.

She took the garter from Rachel and began to dress.

A short time later, she stepped out of the hotel on her father’s arm and started down the path that led to the man-made pond. Donald nodded his gruff approval and kissed her on the cheek. “Your mother would be proud of you,” he said.

As they moved past the grove of trees, a small orchestra struck up Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary.” Corrie felt as if she were floating toward the gathered guests.

Rachel, as maid of honor, led the way along the flagstones toward waiting family and friends. So much family, Corrie thought. Even her brother’s Saint Bernard was in attendance, well-behaved for once and sitting next to her nephews.

The only family member missing was a distant cousin named Stanley Kelvin. She didn’t regret his absence. The truce seemed to be holding as he slowly built up his own business and left the Sinclair House alone.

Then Corrie caught sight of Lucas, waiting for her at the flower-covered bower with the minister, and all thoughts of other people vanished. Their gazes locked. She moved to his side.